Home Frequency

Storm force ten on the west coast. Boats are losing themselves in it.

You have the night watch at Skerry Point Light. You do not go out to them. You sit at the chart table with a valve receiver and a pencil, and one at a time they come up out of the static and ask you where they are.

Tune across the band until a voice comes clear of the hiss. Listen to what they can hear out there in the black — a bell, surf on a shoal, a whistle buoy moaning, your own light turning somewhere off their quarter. Find them: every level they report is a distance, so strike each one as an arc from its landmark and slide your pencil until the arcs and the bearing agree, and the fix locks. Then pick up the key and tell them what to do.

Six contacts between 23.10 and dawn. A day-sailor out too late. A trawler skipper whose shortest way home crosses a bank at low water. A set failing on dying batteries. A ten-year-old girl whose father is unconscious on the deck. Four men on the rocks you cannot reach in time, only find. And, at twenty to four, on a dead carrier that has been sitting at 2310 all night, somebody you know.

Give a course you have not checked against the chart and they will take it, and the bank is exactly where the chart says it is.

The log book on your right fills up as the night goes. It's the only score there is, and the last page is the ending.

Home is not the place you go. It's the light you keep lit for other people — and the one harbour you can't sail back into yourself.

Controls — mouse only. Drag the dial or the tuning knob to tune. Drag the fix across the chart. Click what you want to say. The second brass knob on the set is the volume, and it works on the title screen too. There is no timer and nothing to lose by taking your time on the chart.

Play with sound. Headphones if you have them — it's a game about listening. Full voice cast, and the band has six other stations on it worth finding between calls.

Content note: storm peril, drowning, a child in danger, and grief for someone who didn't come home.